About the Authors

Eric A. Eager is the vice president and partner at SumerSports, a football analytics startup founded by billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones and his son, Jack Jones. Eric currently hosts the SumerSports Show with former Falcons General Manager and two-time NFL Executive of the Year Thomas Dimitroff. Prior to joining Sumer, he founded the industry-leading analytics group at Pro Football Focus (PFF), which is owned by former Bengals wide receiver and current Sunday Night Football color commentator, Cris Collinsworth.

During his career, Eric has built tools used by all 32 NFL teams, over 100 college football teams, and various media entities. His simulation model has been used by NBC’s Steve Kornacki during his “Road to the Playoffs” segment on NBC since 2020; he was also a part of the Fox NFL Game of the Week broadcast with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, before they left for ESPN in 2022. His former podcast, the PFF Forecast, was the most popular football analytics podcast in the world when he left the show.

Eric studied applied mathematics and mathematical biology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he wrote his PhD thesis on how stochasticity and nonlinear processes affect population dynamics. For the first six years of his career, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, where he published more than 25 peer-reviewed research papers on the interface of mathematics, biology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Six of those papers were published with Richard Erickson, his coauthor for this book. After leaving academia for football full-time in 2018, he’s maintained a connection to teaching by building “Linear Algebra for Data Science in R” for DataCamp in 2018, as well as teaching Wharton’s Moneyball Academy course to high school students each summer since 2020.

Eric maintains a strong interest in mentorship, as he wants up-and-coming football analysts to have a more straightforward path to a career than he had. He enjoys reading, writing, biking, rowing, and watching the WNBA with his family. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Stephanie, and daughters Madeline and Chloe.

Richard A. Erickson helps people use mathematics and statistics to understand our world as well as make decisions with this data. He is a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan, and, like thousands of other Cheeseheads, a team owner. He has taught over 32,000 students statistics through graduate-level courses, workshops, and his DataCamp courses “Generalized Linear Models in R” and “Hierarchical and Mixed Effects Models in R.” He also uses Python on a regular basis to model scientific problems.

Richard received his PhD in environmental toxicology with an applied math minor from Texas Tech where he wrote his dissertation on modeling population-level effects of pesticides. He has modeled and analyzed diverse datasets including topics such as soil productivity for the US Department of Agriculture, impacts of climate change on disease dynamics, and improving rural healthcare. Richard currently works as a research scientist and has over 80 peer-reviewed publications. Besides teaching Eric about R and Python, Richard also taught Eric to like cheese curds.

Richard lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin, with his daughter, Margo, and Bernese Mountain Dog, Sadie. When not cheering for his Packers, he likes silent sports, notably biking, hiking, cross-country skiing, sea kayaking, and scuba diving.